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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Finding the right web host

We all know that...well, all of us still in business know that anyway......in order to keep a business going these days you've got to have a presence on the web.

You don't have to be running your whole business on the web, this is true. You don't have to be selling over the web, or to be servicing your customers that way, but you do at least need to have a presence, a reference site.

And of course you can actually service your customers, sell to them, over the web as well. What you want to do is really up to you: and is of course contrained by the real world. A business which sold bridges over the web wouldn't be all that successful while one that sold MP3 files certainly could be. But even so, a bridge building company will need a web presence just to let people know where they can go to get bridges.

Once we've decided what we're going to do online then we need to decide who is going to host it. If all you need is a static site with a bit of email for your bridge building company then one host or type of host may be all you need. If you're going to be selling MP3s then a whole host of different matters come into play. Bandwidth, reliability, how quickly can you expand servers and memory, all these sorts of things. Which is where vps hosting might be worth looking at.

It's a sorta half way stage between a shared server and a dedicated one. You get the interface, the access to the nuts and bolts of the machine, of a dedicated server but still running on a shared server. the detail of one system and the cheapness and flexibility of the other.